Messages

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Discussion / Re: Is there a politics thread? Guess I'm making one

« on: November 08, 2017, 01:44:34 AM »

If you haven't been following the elections in VA, right now it's a big Dem wave. Northam exceeded his polling by around 6 percent and they're on track to take the House, which nobody thought was possible.

Also worth noting that the guy that wrote the bathroom bill has lost his seat to a trans woman.

I'm not gonna try and pretend like I know whether or not this is a portent of things to come but if I was a GOP congress member in a purple state I'd be very nervous right now.

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General Chat / Re: What Games are you Playing 2017?

« on: March 28, 2017, 08:03:59 PM »

By 'more polished ME1', do you also mean the gameplay? Or is it still more of a 3rd person cover shooter like ME2 and 3?

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General Chat / Re: What Games are you Playing 2017?

« on: February 14, 2017, 02:02:04 AM »

You have like one mission left before Dante mode. What difficulty are you playing on, btw?

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General Chat / Re: 2016 Miscellaneous Links: The Links Awaken

« on: November 16, 2016, 02:37:01 PM »

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2_-knUokw90RzIwUEJsU2pYdWs/view

Some kind soul uploaded Warren Spector's original design document for Deus Ex, with handwritten annotations. Definitely worth a read if this sort of thing interests you.

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General Chat / Re: Late 2016 polling!

« on: November 07, 2016, 12:55:14 AM »

2016 polling!

1. No issues on the ballot this year, at least according to Ballotpedia.

2. One long national nervous breakdown

3. This year mostly seems like a blur, to be honest.

4. I'm pretty ok with how things are going. Decent job with plentiful overtime, good car that I've almost paid off...student loans are the only real thing dragging me down, and i'm still pretty lucky compared to a lot of other people as far as that goes.

5. I will be flying to New Mexico to spend time with my other side of the family for Thanksgiving. Christmas will almost certainly be spent watching my nephews open up presents which is always a good time.

6. My car will be paid off in July. Other than that hopefully P5 and Nier Automata come out.

7. 100 dollars worth of Steam funbux would be sweet.

8. Nope.

9. Rarely. If there's a movie I'm interested I'm usually content to wait until you can rent it.

10. Go....outside? Why would I do that?

11. I want to get a PS4 at some point.

12.  The only issue I have here is that our lab's workload has far outstripped our space and personnel, which means 60 hour weeks, every week, for months on end. The overtime has been nice but I don't know if I can maintain that pace for too long, and nobody in management seems to have a solution. We're out of the busy season and things have calmed down considerably, but we still keep having record-breaking months and sooner or later we simply won't be able to keep up.

13. My mom got me a really nice watch a few years ago.

14. Almost got scammed by somebody pretending to be from the government looking to drop my student loans. They keep calling around noonish when I'm asleep so I tend to be half-awake when I get these calls. Anyway I realized what was going on before I gave them any important information at least.

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General Chat / Re: What Games are you playing 2016?

« on: August 13, 2016, 08:21:53 AM »

The general consensus is that the writing is more or less standard Beththesda: The main plot is worthless but there are some good side-bits and areas that work well. People tend to say the gameplay is what they really improved upon.

It's Fallout 3+, not Fallout 4: New Vegas

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General Chat / Re: Idiot of the Day 2016: Election year extravaganza of idiocy.

« on: June 24, 2016, 02:22:02 AM »

http://imgur.com/a/skffp

A very interesting court transcript about a man who wishes to fire his public defender because of unwanted sexual advances.

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Discussion / Re: Is there a politics thread? Guess I'm making one

« on: May 12, 2016, 03:19:42 PM »

The thing is I don't see how endorsing Hillary is a win for anybody. If Hillary wins it's not going to be because a GOP person endorsed her, and you've just given any would-be primary opponents a golden opportunity to paint you as an out of touch RINO. If Hillary loses then you've just pissed off the new leader of your party for no gain. Note your link has the only person with an elected position to defend declaring neutrality, which seems like the best of a bad set of choices.

I could see non-elected conservatives going for Hillary, I guess, but that could still come back to haunt them later.

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Discussion / Re: Is there a politics thread? Guess I'm making one

« on: May 07, 2016, 11:18:04 AM »

Endorsing Hillary would be pretty shocking, considering she's the Republican Anti-Christ. I..guess it's possible they endorse Gary Johnson but more likely they'll just sit it out and let Trump wither on the vine. I doubt their support would make a difference anyway.

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General Chat / Re: What Games are you playing 2016?

« on: May 04, 2016, 03:14:12 AM »

Probably just so end-game wars against civs with dozens of cities isn't even more of a massive slog than it already is. Or they could just make it that way to keep you from running out the clock if you're going for a conquest victory.

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General Chat / Re: Idiot of the Day 2016: Election year extravaganza of idiocy.

« on: April 14, 2016, 01:20:37 AM »

http://twitter.com/SimonMaloy/status/720282508659560448/photo/1

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General Chat / Re: What Games are you playing 2016?

« on: March 27, 2016, 09:11:36 PM »

Unfortunately they waste the twist by handing protagonist duties to Connor, who is by far the worst main character in the series that I've played. At least Haytham still shows up every so often and steals every scene he's in.

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Discussion / Re: Is there a politics thread? Guess I'm making one

« on: March 09, 2016, 03:22:53 PM »

Hillary was pretty much always going to be the nominee, but the fact that it's as close as it is just proves that Sanders and his political message resonate with the democratic base, which is something the establishment really, really needs to keep in mind. Pushing Hildawg left was why he entered the race in the first place.

Then again up to Super Tuesday I was convinced Trump would never be the nominee so what do I know?

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Discussion / Re: Is there a politics thread? Guess I'm making one

« on: March 09, 2016, 02:59:33 PM »

The thing is that Clinton's 200 delegate lead is probably enough. No democratic primaries are winner-take-all so even if Sanders wins Clinton still gets some delegates, and there are plenty of states that favor her coming up. Sanders still needs to win more stages by huge margins to make up the deficit and it remains to be seen if he can pull that off.

Don't get me wrong, the Michigan win was a huge victory for Sanders, but Clinton is still the odds on favorite.

You're right that superdelegates are unpledged and people shouldn't put them in the Clinton column when doing delegate counts. But they're not going to switch unless Bernie has a clear delegate lead.

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General Chat / Re: What Games are you playing 2016?

« on: March 05, 2016, 06:36:43 AM »

Wasn't the sequel going to be an MMO or something stupid like that?

Seconding recommendation for Sleeping Dogs. Other dirt cheap games of note on Steam:

Just Cause 2
Hitman: Blood Money
Thief 1-3 (skip Thief 4, it's garbage. The first three are kind of janky and old but I played them a few months ago and they still hold up pretty well if you like stealth)
The director's cut of Deus Ex 3 is also pretty cheap.

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General Chat / Re: What Games are you playing 2016?

« on: February 26, 2016, 03:37:54 PM »

Niu is the RPGDL Mascot.

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General Chat / Re: What Games are you playing 2016?

« on: February 14, 2016, 03:54:55 AM »

Ciato when the time comes near the end of the game (you'll know it when you see it) take the Renegade interrupt. You know you want to.

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General Chat / Re: What Games are you playing 2015?

« on: December 28, 2015, 01:03:08 AM »

They don't have 'jungle', exactly, but they do have temperate rainforest. Russia is really, really big and has a lot of different biomes in it.

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General Chat / Re: What Games are you playing 2015?

« on: October 17, 2015, 01:42:03 PM »

If it's not too late, don't upgrade your health at all. Getting a nemesis is based on you dying lots, if you're too good or high-leveled then you'll never have anybody noteworthy.

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General Chat / Re: Good morning 2015: Creative topic title goes here.

« on: September 24, 2015, 04:47:10 PM »

So since I finished graduate school I had been mostly poking around in the non-existent job market here (especially non-existent after the oil crash). I signed up to work for a tutoring company in April and it's generally been pretty shitty, with a boss who is utterly incompetent and completely disregards any sort of basic sensibility. First, I was hired and immediately not scheduled for three weeks, even though I was told he had 12 hours a week of work for me (I have never worked 12 hours in my entire time there). When I go to work I never know exactly when I will be working. For example, he sprang on me yesterday that he was tacking an extra hour onto my work, which I hadn't planned for. Great. Work has also been really inconsistent, and sometimes I will be called in to work for one hour! It cost me like half my pay to bus there and back. And he loves to blame things that are his fault on me, like letting students go on too long when I wasn't told how long students are scheduled for. The job is also about an hour of transit away. After my graduate school experience being godawful, I was starting to feel my faith in humanity, and specifically bosses, was pretty much into the negatives.

With that in mind, I decided to look for a job that would not directly conflict with the job I had, because I want the reference from the tutoring center for my teaching application even though it is pretty bad, so I applied to some retail stuff to mostly work mornings. After a few months I ended up getting hired at a Starbucks as primarily a morning worker. I really didn't know what to expect, but it's been so great so far. My boss is really nice and accommodating (and is even a geek girl), and all of my coworkers are super chill and friendly. It's largely situated in a neighborhood filled with old people, who are largely nice and enjoy interacting with young people. Also... so much free coffee.

I have been balancing the multiple jobs pretty well, although the days I work at both jobs can be pretty difficult. But yesterday, at my tutoring job, I was confronted by my boss, who said a parent had called and complained that his daughter didn't get all the answers right on her homework and that he wasn't impressed. Of course, at the tutoring center I have three students at once for an hour or so, so you allocate relatively smaller amounts of time to every student, so you can't really thoroughly check everyone's homework, and that essentially my job is to outline how to get to the right answer, not to do a student's homework. Which of course my boss is aware of. The format just doesn't work that well for a student who needs a lots of attention.

At this point I start to wonder if the job is really worth it, especially since I have a second job to fall back on. The extra income is obviously really nice, but the commute is really long and the job isn't very enjoyable (and doesn't pay so well that I would feel horrible quitting).

thank you for making me feel better about not doing grad school

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General Chat / Re: What Games are you playing 2015?

« on: September 19, 2015, 06:42:23 AM »

Is there a place that goes more into detail on what they changed in Hong Kong?

Also i think the main complaint people have with returns is that there's a enemy type that pops up later on that is unkillable without specific weapons, of which you only get a handful (and few people can use them). It's pretty tedious and really made the endgame drag on.

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General Chat / Re: Idiot of the Day 2015: More stupid than stupid.

« on: September 18, 2015, 03:33:16 AM »

pfft it wasn't a black sphere with a skull and crossbones label and a fuse sticking out of it, that's no bomb

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General Chat / Re: Idiot of the Day 2015: More stupid than stupid.

« on: September 17, 2015, 02:16:54 AM »

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/northwest-dallas-county/headlines/20150915-irving-ninth-grader-arrested-after-taking-homemade-clock-to-school.ece

They led Ahmed into a room where four other police officers waited. He said an officer he’d never seen before leaned back in his chair and remarked: “Yup. That’s who I thought it was.”

I think my favorite part is how nobody can understand why a kid that likes electronics would try to build a clock, so it obviously must have been a bomb. That and they apparently needed 4 cops to handle a 14 year old kid.

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General Chat / Re: What Games are you playing 2015?

« on: May 27, 2015, 03:53:49 PM »

You may also enjoy the Gentlemen of Steelport mod, which adds some new clothing and different clothing options for all your pretty princess dress up needs.

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General Chat / Re: What Games are you playing 2015?

« on: February 11, 2015, 03:41:31 PM »

I thought the idea was that Ardat Yakshi is like some sort of recessive genetic disorder so people can carry the gene but not be Ardat Yakshi themselves. So the reapers could make banshees out of full-blown ardat yakshi or just carriers of the gene, which is presumably far more common. That's also why asari-asari relationships are frowned upon-makes it more likely for Ardat Yakshi to crop up.

edit: Grefter you know as well as I do that running Shepard through a blood maze would be great, especially if they looped Shepard VA instead of a baby crying or some shit.